Day 3384 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:18 NIV

Seems to me that the present isn’t the promise as surely His fullness isn’t limited to this lifetime we’re destined to leave behind.

Rather, as the darkness of these darkening days closes in all around and presses us toward the pressures of persecutions we’d prefer we not endure, might we simply remember that what truly matters most is not what we go through but rather where we get to go to. For this life as lived in this world as lost as it’s finding so many reasons to irreverently remain, it isn’t going to the endless sunshine and simplicity that we’d otherwise like to imagine into expectation. No, in this world we will have trouble.

But to that let us remember to take heart for in His overcoming this world we find the ticket to where we’re going. And in that hope of going home we learn that to go is to leave what home isn’t.

And as days do indeed descend deeper into the disquiet of desires demanding fires finding futility without fail to be the only faith to which most folks will offer their fealty, I for one find that hope of a distant home as beautiful as my hatred for such patience as needed to be found in it has always been. For we are a people who loathe the waiting as we’ve come to consider time as money and money as material and material as need and need as the very foundation of a life worth living.

Thus our needs as grown for granted due to the lies through which we’ve come to see through eyes stained by wants and wishes winning wars for souls every second, well, such has become in us an impatience unwilling to entertain any time given unto giving away what we’d otherwise prefer to have. Yes, preferences and opinions have all but entirely become the summation of our assumption of life’s meaning. And so we’ve come to believe only that our lives will have a meaning worth their living should we have our many preferences pacified.

And we’ll toss a tizzy whenever such idols let us down in either not coming in the time in which we want nor in the manner in which we’d prefer, nor, and most commonly, not come at all.

For this is indeed the disaster for which we design our destinies as if we’re able to do such work for the devil. That is all that desires are really, just the devil doing his bidding in us for us. It’s his way of working our ways toward those wants and wishes that’ve left us actually assuming that a life could be so easy, so comfortable, so undemanding as to just give us everything we want without ever even hinting at anything we’ve done our best to make clear we don’t.

Such is the evidence sin in us, these many misplaced priorities paving paths toward a perfection we’ve picked for the provision of the preferences we’ve preferred over the presence of the Savior who came to show us what was needed to save us from that selfishness consuming us with these ideas that our ideals are not idols that we’ve given our souls to serve. Alas we’ve become and in many ways remain slaves to self, slaves to the sin within.

And thus we exist within a distance that distance doesn’t even understand.

For if we did understand this separation we’re selecting within the sins to which we’re still dedicating our time and thus our lives, well, then we’d realize perhaps a portion of what God’s always known: That whilst hearts can indeed be made new, it takes first the humility to embrace the necessity of such renewal before a heart can welcome the war that such a gift demands against the complacencies that have defined our confinement within ourselves within the sins we’ve agreed are worth more than our waiting for more.

But we don’t and thus we won’t. We don’t understand this length of life we’ve run to death. We don’t understand the sheer volume of our mistakes nor the volume they speak against the hope we claim we need. Nor do we even seem to understand that our mistakes do speak said volume against the victory that’s already been achieved for us without our even having to lift a finger but a lone and feeble prayer asking Him to do in us what He said He’s done for us:

Make us new so that our old can just go cold with the world to which it belonged.

For the beauty of His benevolent mercy is that He chose to show that we belong to this world as much as an ice cube belongs on the sun. He gave His life to testify to the dissolutions which exist by nature between oil and water. That sin doesn’t come to the Son. That our pasts need left if the new is to come and begin in us why He came for us. Salvation. For salvation cannot accomplish the hope of Heaven if we’ve still hearts holding fast to a modicum of inspiration confined on this side of eternity.

Thus for us to be found in Him demands we see that this life is a fire sale in which everything must go.

Because if we’re to find and hold the hope of our going home, nothing can be seen as inviting in this world. Nothing. Nothing here should be expected to be of such substance that it re-invites, reignites in us any willingness at all to perhaps shift again our focuses to this firmament. Nothing here should be sought with any degree of insistence upon it being of such substance that we’re willing, even for an instant, to discount again the hope of our home with Him for a moment of ease along the way.

But the problem is that our human nature as defined by our need for such ease always seems to sneak up and stifle our sense of salvation’s severity. We’ve become so intent on becoming content within comfort that we seek it incessantly. And therein lies perhaps the biggest hurdle for us to get over, or at the very least one of very few massive issues presented by this faith for the road He’s found along.

For His path was proven one not of worldly comfort, not of social acceptance, not of personal safety, not even one with the enduring absence of physical harm. No, His path led through deserts of temptation, times of misunderstanding, confrontations with the powers who still pretend the power to make punishment permanent, even going so very far as to agree unwittingly with what He’d already chosen to do: Lose a life. For you see, that was His choice so as to show us what we might expect.

Sadly as Pharisees ourselves at times, we see not a humbled expectation but rather a vengeful inflection of our assumption that we’ve more say than reality has ever really even hinted at our having.

No, we have no say in almost all of life. So little inference in fact that gratitude should indeed by the attitude for which we’re known unto all, the Son of Heaven more than any other. And yet such isn’t at all what we show nor thus anything that we see. Rather we see instead a people perfectly pitiable standing proudly upon this pretense that since He died for us then we shouldn’t even have to wade through worry along the way to that promise His punishment provides.

We carry ourselves as if it’s right or reasonable for us to insist we miss anything that might be miserable. As if Christ is the only One who need suffer for our salvation. As if salvation isn’t worth our suffering. As if He needs to stay on that cross or in that grave so that we can stave the struggle we don’t want to face. Indeed, we’ve sadly become a people entitled to a fault, obviously not noticing the irony in that we are entitled only to fault as the fault is all ours while the mercy is all His.

Something which should inspire us to lay down our old understandings for the opportunity at an increased and ever-growing understanding of who He is and where that means we’ve now the hope to someday be.

Someday.

See, that’s the side of salvation that our arrogance seems to miss. It’s that salvation is a promise, but that like all promises, it’s one paid over time. It’s a matter of patience, a provision proven in full up ahead. It’s His promise to overcome what we’ve still not messed up as these people we’ve become who are so vastly unable to care that we’ll still chose the wrong choices even though we know the cost of their consequences. No, we care not to count costs only the regret we have in having to admit them.

Such is why we want so clearly the path of least resistance. It’s less risky. It asks less of us. It allows us to scrape by on the absolute bare minimum effort and output. That’s why we enjoy comfort so much as to contend for it. That’s actually about all we do seem willing to fight for anymore. Just comfort. For comfort allows a steadied complacency that we can carry onward without fail, without struggle, without worry. Yes, comfort is something we can handle as comfort is again easy.

And simply put, we don’t suck at easy.

No, we can handle easy. We can find reason to enjoy sunny days as we head off to the park to play again as if life is so little and light as to approach it as if a game meant to be enjoyed and won so easily that it takes no effort beyond enjoyment. We can lounge and laze by pools as we pass the days that might ask us away from the relative ease of such involuntary interest in anything else. We can learn to lie as we say we love when in reality we’d not lose anything for anything we say we like.

Thus we’re not at all who He is, and thus nor should we expect so much more than what He proved this life to be. Yet that’s exactly what we do without fail. We live as if we’re owed an easier ride than He rode. We pretend, and it is only pretend, that we should be afforded a life of ease simply because we bought a Bible or said a prayer or know how to spell Yahweh. As if His reward is truly so little as to reside inside something on a shelf or conveyed in the few fleeting words of a single prayer or some captured in our attempt to confine Him in letters we can look at.

As if faith and our Father are of such mediocrity as to cast them both in alongside our designing of a life we think well lived.

Since when has it been our hand to determine how to live a life well? What do we know of living life at all when our pasts have proven our penchant for the death of sin instead? We’re not the ones to insist on anything for we know nothing of anything about everything that He is as we still to this day deny what He’s doing. And we do this every single time that we gripe and whine as if life isn’t fair simply because life can be hard.

Friends, this should be hard. This should be miserable. Life in this land of the lost should become so cumbersome that we cannot wait to shed whatever of here may remain inside these hearts which should be desperate for nothing but more of Him. But is it? Is this life as we’re living it one in which this world feels less and less like home every day? Or rather are our comforts allowing us to at times consider the challenge of such a life as that given unto following where we know He went?

For we still live as if life isn’t worth dying for.

And friends, the problem is that when that is our outlook, well then how could we ever come anywhere close to understanding His message? For if we cannot bear to look upon the brutality into which He’s said we just might share, then are we not saying only that such couldn’t possibly happen to us? And can we not say that only because we just don’t want to share it?

Many here hold to a watered-down faith that affords them the hope of something better with the ability to remain convinced that they needn’t hurt for it. But as for me, I believe fully in the cross and thus too the cost of what it took to take me by the hand and help me out of here. And so I can’t understand a faith that affords us the ease of worrying about what we might go through to get home. To me, that hope of that home is all that matters and somehow He helps it matter more only every single second of every single day filled with every single struggle that none of us want to go through.

But thanks be to God alone for He is helping me see that what I want cannot matter anymore. For it is my wants, my wishes, my preferences and opinions which have defined my past as one deserving of the grave without the hope of life found beyond it. But that He gives us that hope of life waiting beyond the death we deserve, such is becoming in me a strange willingness to welcome whatever this life needs to become for me to want only that hope more than anything else, more than everything else.

Because if it takes this life hurting, this time spent losing, this line one drawn only toward furnaces and lion’s dens, how could we not welcome it if He says it’ll lead us closer Him and thus closer to home?

We can do as many will and make this as hard to let go as we want to. But friends, please just know that the more we insist this life go a certain way as to please our preference for a life of ease, such will only make faith harder to feel. And so settle for the standard assumption of ease and comfort in this life if you wish. Not me. No, while it may be a strange outlook, I personally want a hope held after here, not something I can find along the way.

For if hope is something so feeble as to be found alongside struggle and mixed in with strife, then what is hope worth?

No, like Paul here, I find that whatever struggle we go through in the temporality of this life is not at all worth even mentioning as that same time could be given unto remembering the hope we have that this life is in fact temporary and that thus everything we face in it will too end. And so that end I hope we can all learn what hope really is. For hope isn’t something so simple as a simple life. No, hope is something impossibly priceless for it was brought to us through the blood He shed for us.

And so if it means I bleed a little too, then I reckon that means I just get to see this life through His eyes for a second. And who knows but that in that we might learn to see that this life is worth suffering and surrendering if such means a share in what He said comes only after this present suffering is behind us forever.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold